Red Pitaya (computer)
Red Pitaya is a single-board computer with fast analog input and output ports. It has customizable real-time signal processing capabilities through an on-board FPGA. The project is intended to be an alternative for many expensive laboratory measurement and control instruments. It is known as open-source, though the hardware design is proprietary.
Description
The Red Pitaya has two 125 MS/s RF input and two 125 MS/s RF outputs, with 50 MHz analogue bandwidth and 14-bit analog-to-digital (ADC) and digital-to-analog converters. The software includes oscilloscope, spectrum analyzer, signal generator, LCR meter, and 50 MHz 2x2 MIMO PID controller. It can be re-programmed to become other devices, as all the IO ports are connected to a common field-programmable gate array. There are also auxiliary ADC and digital IO.It has three USB 2.0 ports, Wi-Fi, Ethernet connector. Internally, it uses Linux as an operating system. The mass storage device for the operating system is a micro-SD card.
Due to the wide bandwidth of the ADC and DAC, the Red Pitaya can be used as a software-defined radio receiver and transmitter and in other radio frequency applications. HAMLAB, a fully featured SDR HF transceiver with an output power of 10 W based on the Red Pitaya board is released in the amateur radio market in October 2016.
Although the software for this project is made freely available, the device is not a fully Open Source Hardware project, because the device's electrical schematics are not made openly available.